


Hero Worship

by zarabithia



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Community: heroines_fest, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-08
Updated: 2010-09-08
Packaged: 2017-10-11 14:24:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/113367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarabithia/pseuds/zarabithia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grace really hates Tuesdays. Barda makes one of them marginally better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hero Worship

  
In the entire four years that Grace Choi had worked at _Chumley's_, she had never had a so much as a single Tuesday that could qualify as a "good" day. It was her first meta bar, and it had taken a while to learn the ropes, but she'd finally figured out that Tuesdays in a meta bar were like Mondays for regular folks.

On Tuesdays, the spillover from overindulgence, both of the chemical kind and the criminal kind, was still being cleaned up by half the folks that frequented the place, and still being committed by the other half, albeit at a much slower pace. As a result, heated tempers and bruised egos from the fights during the weekend before caused fights to break out in the bar more often, and Grace's duty as the bouncer of the place caused her to work harder than ever on Tuesdays.

Tuesdays also saw a statistically improbably amount of roof-destroying alien invasions - not that Grace was counting, or anything. But Seraphina, with her equally improbably good-looking brown eyes, noticed the trend, and Grace had a tendency to notice _most_ things Chumley's resident bartender mentioned.

Still, the random roof destructions weren't particularly high on Grace's hate list. Far, far higher on that list was scrubbing up the excess vomit that also tended to increase on Tuesdays, and the urine from the patrons whose aim fucking sucked any day of the week but seemed to double in amount on Tuesdays.

She desperately needed a new job, sexy bartender or no. Cleaning up the men's bathroom wasn't on her list of job duties as a _bouncer. _

It was while she was bent over, scrubbing out a particularly vulgar urinal - one in which the patron had mistaken the urinal for a place to shit and vomit, in addition to piss, much to Grace's disgust - that Grace met her idol.

She hadn't realized, at first, that it was her idol at all. She'd been too busy trying not to lose her own lunch over the smell (that clearly wasn't going to wash off, and so much for getting Seraphina to flirt back _tonight_) to notice anything different about footsteps rapidly approaching the bathroom.

When the door did swing open, Grace didn't even look up before she snapped, "In case you're too fucking drunk to read, the bathroom is closed at the moment." Because the last thing she needed was the sound of bodily functions while she cleaned up this mess.

Grace _did_ pay attention to the footsteps then, as they continued into the bathroom, as though the patron hadn't heard her at all. They were firm, confident steps that told Grace the patron was larger than most and far too steady to be drunk.

Sobriety was a definite surprise on a Tuesday morning, but it didn't calm Grace's ire any as she turned around. "Look, I told you - "

And then she stopped, because Grace Choi's temper was legendary enough that she had dyed the hair red to match, but she couldn't just stand there and yell at _Big Barda._

Big Barda ignored the start of Grace's sentence, whatever Grace was going to stay, and look of stupid surprise that Grace was sure she had all over her face. She stepped forward, inspecting Grace's work as though it was an actual battleground, and merely lowered one corner of her mouth in disgust.

"I have seen worse," she commented. "Are the stalls in a similar disgusting state?"

"No," Grace answered, amazed that she could actually find her voice and make it work. "You do know this is the men's bathroom, right?"

"You should be equally _aware_ that I have no intention of waiting for another twenty minutes standing in line to use the women's bathroom."

It wasn't particularly a question, and Big Barda didn't wait for an answer to her non-question before striding over to the stall and shutting the door behind her.

Grace had met a lot of heroes in her job (she'd met a lot of villains too, but that was besides the point.) She'd had plenty of experience getting up close and personal with a particular number of the heroes in question, too. In certain cases, she'd had the opportunity to get _especially_ close with some of the heroes in question. The past four years had definitely jaded her to the concept of hero worship.

At least, that was the case most of the time. But the woman in the stall wasn't just _anyone_. That was _Big Barda_, a woman Grace had always respected and looked up to, in a fashion that even Grace couldn't deny was pure worship.

In the amount of time that it took Big Barda to finish, Grace tried to come up with a good way to express just how much Big Barda had meant to Grace over the years.

But it wasn't a simple story. Telling it would have necessitated delving into the Tanner incident that Grace tried so hard to forget, because the first time Grace had ever came across Big Barda had been a week after running away from that man. She'd been an innocent, more or less and lost bystander in a city far away from home watching a family perish in a buring car, when Big Barda had stepped out of the crowd and ripped the door off the car.

Grace had walked away from that experience with the impression of a large and powerful woman who was sure of herself. Big Barda hadn't needed or cared about either the awe of the crowd that day, nor the awareness the crowd had of her impressive strength.

As Grace had left that day and began to fully realize her own powers and strength, the near meeting with Big Barda had stayed with her. The confidence she'd tried to emulate had always been with Grace, even if she would readily admit that her life's experiences tended to lend a more cynical viewpoint that Grace was sure Big Barda never carried.

Grace would have loved to have shared just how much that brief experience had helped her, and how much it had helped her recover after the Tanner experience.

But as Big Barda emerged and moved to wash her hands, no matter how hard Grace tried, the words seemed to stick in her throat. Big Barda finished washing her hands, nodded to Grace, and exited the bathroom before Grace could even start to express her feelings.

Grace finally found her voice then, after Big Barda had left, and she cursed loudly at the empty space.

Tuesdays _definitely_ sucked.


End file.
